Faced with mounting criticism over the controversial viral video Kony 2012, now viewed 36 million times on YouTube, the filmmaker behind efforts to arrest Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony took to the airwaves Thursday, mounting a passionate and at times strange defence of the online campaign.

Revealing the film about catching the head of the Lord’s Resistance Army rebel group had raised $5-million in just 48 hours, Jason Russell responded to claims the campaign would end in bloodshed by suggesting Kony could be caught without causing deaths because humans “put man on the moon.”

Despite unprecedented publicity for the film, which has won the backing of global celebrities including Rihanna, Justin Bieber and Ryan Gosling, the charity responsible, Invisible Children, has been denounced as “irresponsible” and “immoral” while others have have questioned whether a global manhunt for a war criminal should be mounted using re-tweets, T-shirts, bracelets and posters.

“You really should do your research because this is a very unique and special case in which people do not have to die,” Mr. Russell said.

“We put a man on the moon. That’s what we did as human beings. People maybe should have died doing that but we figured it out.”

The key to capturing Mr. Kony is to outsmart him, Mr. Russell said in the interview.

“We have to use our technology and resources and human power to ask him to surrender because we don’t want this to end bloody,” he said, calling Mr. Kony “the world’s worst criminal.”

“We don’t want bombs being dropped. We don’t want a bullet through his head. We want him alive. That’s the win.”

Mr. Russell said he sees a “beautiful ending” to the manhunt that ends with Mr. Kony surrendering peacefully, boarding a helicopter and being tried in the International Criminal Court.

“I believe that [Mr. Kony] is listening to what’s going on the world right now. I believe that he can hear our voice. I believe he needs to hear we accept his surrender,” Mr. Russell said. “We will take him in handcuffs to the Hague.”

Although the video campaign has faced significant criticism over the last 48 hours, a war crimes expert from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont., who once worked for the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in the Hague, commended the campaign.

“The essential information presented, particularly about the large-scale and atrocious crimes instigated by Kony, is accurate,” said Darryl Robinson, a law professor.

“The video and the organizers have been subjected to an array of intense criticisms. The intensity and diversity of the criticisms are puzzling.”

Invisible Children released a statement earlier in the day that hit back at criticism that the film’s message is dangerous and misdirected.

Some of the concern centered on how whether the film was selling viewers a censored version of foreign intervention.

“The immediate question is whether [Kony] is captured or killed,” wrote PhD student Jack McDonald from King’s College London’s war studies department.

“The idea that popular opinion can be leveraged with viral marketing to induce foreign military intervention is really, really dangerous,” he writes.

“It is immoral to try and sell a sanitized vision of foreign intervention that neglects the fact that people will die as a result. That goes for politicians as much as for Jason Russell.”

A 2011 Foreign Affairs story about the LRA claimed Invisible Children was among several charities that have “manipulated facts for strategic purposes, exaggerating the scale of LRA abductions and murders and emphasizing the LRA’s use of innocent children as soldiers, and portraying Kony — a brutal man, to be sure — as uniquely awful, a Kurtz-like embodiment of evil.”

The Kony 2012 campaign lobbies for a sustained U.S. military presence in Uganda. Last October, U.S. President Barack Obama agreed to send 100 troops to the Eastern African country and Invisible Children wants them to stay there.

“[The Kony 2012 campaign] supports the deployment of U.S. advisors and the provision of intelligence and other support that can help locate and bring Kony to justice, but also increased diplomacy to hold regional governments accountable to their basic responsibilities to protect civilians from this kind of brutal violence,” a statement posted on the Invisible Children website says.

The charity then directs readers to a letter their CEO Ben Keesey penned to President Obama, wherein he encourages President Obama to “sustain the deployment of U.S. advisors until the LRA longer poses a serious threat to civilians.”

“While it draws attention to the fact that Kony, indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court in 2005, is still on the loose, it’s portrayal of his alleged crimes in Northern Uganda are from a bygone era,” he said.

“At the height of the war between especially 1999 and 2004, large hordes of children took refuge on the streets of Gulu town to escape the horrors of abduction and brutal conscription to the ranks of the LRA. Today most of these children are semi-adults. Many are still on the streets unemployed. Gulu has the highest numbers of child prostitutes in Uganda. It also has one of the highest rates of HIV/AIDS and Hepatitis.”

The campaign won’t make Kony famous, Mr. Izama writes, but will make Invisible Children famous.

In their statement, the charity concedes that the LRA has left Uganda and entered neighbouring nations, but says: “The Ugandan government’s army, the UPDF, is more organized and better equipped than that of any of the other affected countries (DRC, South Sudan, CAR) to track down Joseph Kony.”

“The people and government of Uganda have a vested interested in seeing him stopped,” the statement goes on to say.

Former child soldier Jacob is featured only briefly in the film, which later includes interviews with Mr. Russell’s five-year-old son and shots of Invisible Children volunteers in the U.S. holding signs and giving speeches.

Critics have also questioned whether support for American intervention to train government forces means they are siding with Ugandan officials, who have been accused of human rights abuses of their own — but Invisible Children says this is not the case.

“We do not defend any of the human rights abuses perpetrated by the Ugandan government or the Ugandan army (UPDF),” the charity writes. “None of the money donated through Invisible Children ever goes to the government of Uganda. Yet the only feasible and proper way to stop Kony and protect the civilians he targets is to coordinate efforts with regional governments.”

The accountability and transparency score is low because the charity has four independent voting members on their board instead of five, Invisible Children said in their statement.

“We are in the process of interviewing potential board members, and we will add an additional independent member this year in order to regain our 4-star rating by 2013,” it says.

Invisible Children also addressed accusations the bulk of their money goes towards travel and compensation, rather than towards direct services.

Their Audited Financial Report for the 2011 fiscal year, available online, shows the company had expenses of $8,894,632. Only thirty-two per cent of that money appears to go to direct services.

But the charity says this line item expense statement is not the “clearest way to show the purpose of different organizational expenses,” and instead offers up an expense statement by class from their 2011 Invisible Children annual report.

In the annual report, it says 37% of their expenses went towards their Central Africa programs, 26% went to awareness programs and 8% went to film production.

The Kony 2012 campaign kicked off just as the LRA, a cultish militia that has terrorized parts of Africa for decades, launched a new spate of attacks in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

It exploded online, with celebrities like Sean “Diddy” Combs and Rihanna tweeting about stopping the Ugandan war criminal, using the hash tag #stopkony.

Started in 1998, the LRA is believed to have killed, kidnapped and mutilated tens of thousands of people in a reign of terror across some of Africa’s most remote and hostile terrain. Young boys were often sent to war and young girls were forced to become sex slaves.

Kony’s actions spread to Sudan, South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Although indicted in 2005 by the International Criminal Court, Mr. Kony, a former altar boy whose movement draws on messianic beliefs and a smattering of Christian motifs, has so far evaded capture.

Writing about a previous Invisible Children film he saw — also about Mr. Kony and the LRA — Yale University’s Chris Blattman, an assistant professor in political science and economics, said he felt that film had an uncomfortable tone.

“There’s also something inherently misleading, naive, maybe even dangerous, about the idea of rescuing children or saving of Africa. It’s often not an accidental choice of words, even if it’s unwitting,” he wrote on his blog.

“It hints uncomfortably of the White Man’s Burden. Worse, sometimes it does more than hint. The savior attitude is pervasive in advocacy, and it inevitably shapes programming. Usually misconceived programming. The saving attitude pervades too many aid failures, not to mention military interventions.”

The LRA rebels currently number several hundred, a fraction of their strength at their peak but still include a core of hardened fighters.

The UN refugee agency UNHCR said the LRA was striking again after a lull in the second half of 2011.

One person has been killed, 17 abducted and 3,000 displaced in 20 attacks in Orientale province in northeastern Congo this year.

However, Mounoubai Madnodje, a spokesman for the UN’s Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo said the LRA was on its last legs.

“We think right now it’s the last gasp of a dying organization that’s still trying to make a statement,” he said.